168: Sourdough Buns (King Arthur Flour)

The 4th of July is all about grilling and barbecue, so I decided to make some homemade buns for all the meat Alex was going to cook. When we woke up, we weren’t really in the mood to grill, so we decided to put it off until Monday (hooray 3 day weekend!) and have some barbecue pork instead.

Still, homemade buns sounded perfect for barbecue pork, so I down to business. I didn’t really have a ton of time, though, so I made the fastest recipe I found, which was the Sourdough Buns recipe from King Arthur Flour. This recipe called for a cup of starter, which was exciting because I wanted to use up what I had, but it also called for a tablespoon of yeast. Other ingredients of note include powdered milk (affiliate link), oil, and an egg.

This recipe was pretty simple, and relatively speedy. You mix together all the ingredients (I did this in my stand mixer), and let rest for 30 minutes. Next you’re supposed to roll it out and cut out 8 3.75 inch circles, with English Muffin rings, I suppose. Since I didn’t have that, I divided the dough into 8 balls (which I even weighed to get them all approximately the same size), and flattened them out to about 3.75 inches, and about ½ inches thick. I put these on a greased cookie sheet, sprinkled with sesame seeds, covered with plastic wrap to let them rise.

After letting them rise for 45 minutes, you bake them. I decided mine hadn’t risen at all, so I preheated the oven for about a minute, turned it off, and stuck them in there for another 30-45 minutes. That did the trick – they looked puffy and pretty then. I removed the dough from the oven, preheated it to 375F, and baked them for 20 minutes. The recipe said they’d be lightly browned, and they were.

Sourdough Hamburger Buns - I think they look awfully pretty

I thought these looked very nice, and very appealing. We cut open a few and put some barbeque pork on them. I’m including a picture of that here so you can see more of the texture of the bread.

Barbeque pork on a sourdough bun

I really enjoyed these. These were large, hearty buns like you would get on a good restaurant burger. They had a good flavor, and I liked them much better than the buns I made the next day. I will try other recipes, but I think this may be the perfect sourdough bun in that it was fast, easy to make, and turned out really well. Part of that was probably because of the yeast. The only downside of these is that you need a serious burger to put on these – you can’t have a quarter pounder with this bread.